“I know your type!” bellowed Mr. Jiggs at her terrified face. “Hanging around all day taking up space! If I catch you reading my comic books without paying for them I’ll throw you out personally before you know what’s hit!”
Miss Toonie laughed gaily after he’d stamped away.
“Well!” she said. “That was the worst fit in years. Something more than usual is bothering him I’d say!”
Melba was shaking with fear. She looked pleadingly at Miss Toonie.
“I didn’t mean to take up space,” she whispered, finding her voice somehow.
“Good heavens!” snorted the old lady. “Don’t pay any attention to him. He’s batty. Look at the cats. They’re not the least worried.” Not only were the cats not worried, but several dozen of them had quietly followed Mr. Jiggs into the back room. There, if Melba and Miss Toonie could have seen, they curled up peacefully on the floor surrounding his chair. And when, after throwing himself morosely down, Mr. Jiggs picked up his guitar to play again, cat ears all over the store stood up and quivered ecstatically with the first chord.
Melba was silent for a minute. Then she swallowed hard and spoke up again.
“Why doesn’t Mr. Jiggs fix the leaks if they bother him so much?” she whispered. “Why does he allow the cats to live here?”
Miss Toonie shrugged. “I don’t ask,” she said. “Who can tell what goes on in the mind of such a man. I guess most of the time he’s too sunk down to notice what happens in this store. And that’s a good thing too, or my cats would probably be dead by now.”
Melba nodded.
“There’s only so much room in the world for small, helpless things like cats,” Miss Toonie went on. “My cats are the leftovers, the ones who have gotten pushed out. This store is the last hope they have!”
“How many cats do live here?” asked Melba, feeling a little better.
“Round about a hundred last count,” said Miss Toonie. “They come and go, you know, depending on what’s for dinner.”
“What is for dinner usually?”
“Old ice cream, old danish, old candy bars, that sort of thing. The mouse population isn’t what it used to be around here.”
“I guess not,” said Melba.
She took a bite of hot fudge. “Where do they sleep?”
“Well, where do you think?” snapped Miss Toonie, suddenly tired of the discussion. “I can’t take them all home with me, can I?”
Melba blushed and fumbled with her glasses. She finished her hot fudge sundae in silence, and got up to go. But Miss Toonie had been watching her. Leaning abruptly across the counter, she barked out:
“Why do you hang around here all the time? Haven’t you got any friends or brothers or sisters?”
“Only one brother,” answered Melba, with downcast eyes. “Five years older than I am.”
“Well…?” Miss Toonie’s cat-fur eyebrows reared suspiciously.
“And. Well. He’s crazy,” muttered Melba. “One look at these cats and he’d go after his shotgun. He likes to shoot things.”
Miss Toonie frowned. “Let him try,” she snarled. “My cats would tear him to pieces!”
The old woman leaned backward and placed two dried-up paws on her hips.
“I stand by my cats!” she declared with unexpected fury. “The whole rest of my family was dead and buried long ago!”
“Sorry to hear it,” murmured Melba, politely. Miss Toonie glared at her.
“I’d take cats over people any time,” she said proudly. “They’re clean. They’re honest. And they don’t play games. If they want to be friends they say so, and if they don’t they stay away. You always know where you are with a cat!”
Miss Toonie spoke with such an accusing tone in her voice that Melba looked guiltily at her feet. Then she swallowed a huge gulp of air, gathered her courage, and spoke.
“Miss Toonie,” she said, as straight as she could with her eyes still glued to her shoes. “Miss Toonie, I think you make the best hot fudge sundaes in the whole state of New York.”
But Miss Toonie had turned her back. Frowning even more fiercely, she stuck a movie magazine up in front of her face and refused to say another word. She was a grumpy old lady all right, and why Melba should want to spend perfectly good time sitting around with her in a run-down, cat-ridden drug store is something most people wouldn’t understand.
“Hey! Wait a minute!”
There goes Melba, interrupting again. Her hand is still set and ready on the telephone to dial up the Guinness Book of World Records.
“Hold up!” she says, holding up a free hand. “That’s a pretty black picture you just painted of me and Miss Toonie, and I’ve got to say something about it. You’ve got me gulping and cringing like a two year old lost in the supermarket. (I will not be called a scared rabbit!) And you’ve made a bad mistake about Miss Toonie.
“Well, maybe she was a little grumpy, but it wasn’t because of a man who ran off and left her. That’s a groundless rumor that started up because people in Applesap couldn’t think of any other reason why Miss Toonie was living alone.
“Whenever you see a woman who has decided to make her own way in life, immediately you find a whole lot of people who will tell you she’s frustrated in love. It doesn’t matter if it’s not true. They’ll whisper it around anyway, and speculate about what happened.
“See, people have got to talk, and one of the best subjects to talk about is other people. And, if you can talk about other people so they end up sounding worse than you are, that’s the best of all because it raises you up in the world. (I notice these things.)
“If Miss Toonie was grumpy, I guess I can see one reason why. There was all of Applesap whispering and snickering when the only thing she’d done was decide she was happier getting on by herself. I would have been angry too.
“In fact, that’s my next point. All this cringing and gulping you have me doing doesn’t get to the root of the matter. I was shy back then all right. But underneath, when no one was looking, I got angry as much as any person. You should have seen how fierce I used to get up in my room. I would stamp around and tell people off to their faces. I must have pinched Irma Herring five hundred times for not inviting me to her party. I was always pinching Irma, even before the party came up. I had a good reason.
“She and her friends used to laugh at me in class when I couldn’t answer a question. She told everyone I was stupid. But one day, she figured a number problem wrong on the blackboard. It was my turn up next. I did it right, in front of everyone!
“That made Irma furious. When I walked back to my desk, she reached out and pinched me. Hard. Then all her friends laughed as if she’d done something smart. I felt terrible.
“After that, I was afraid of Irma. But underneath, I was angry. When I found out she’d invited everyone except me to her party, I was even more afraid, and more angry. I had such terrible feelings about Irma Herring’s party that when the invitation did come, I didn’t want to go.
“I didn’t like parties back then anyway. There is nothing like a party for making a shy person stick out like a sore thumb. Everyone else is talking and running around together. And there is the shy person, over in a corner, getting ignored and being afraid people will notice how ignored she is.
“Anyway, just so you know I wasn’t a cringer and a gulper all the way through, let me tell you that I did go to Irma’s party in the end. But not in her house. I went in my own room where no one else could see. I talked and ran around and was the star of the whole party, just the way Victor always is. And when it came time to leave, I pinched Irma harder than ever, and stamped off down the street.
“Maybe it sounds dumb to pretend things like that in your room. But it wasn’t such a bad way to operate. I was getting practiced up, and when the real day came…
“Well!” says Melba, cutting herself off. “That comes in later. I don’t mean to jump the gun. And now, could you talk a little more quietly while I make this phone call? No, I’m
not nervous. Not at all. I just need some quiet.”
Chapter Four
MELBA’S SPEAKING UP IN favor of Miss Toonie’s hot fudge sundaes changed things at the store.
In the days that followed, Miss Toonie wasn’t quite so grumpy. Once in a while she let Melba take the cats for walks, a few at a time. And she taught her how to sort the new magazines and newspapers that were delivered in bundles to the store. She showed her how to make a hot fudge sundae, too, and how to twist the whipped cream can at such an angle—and release the button at the same time—that a dashing flourish of cream stood up straight on top, all ready to be crowned by the cherry.
Meanwhile, Melba was finding out that she didn’t have to blush and gulp whenever she wanted to ask Miss Toonie a question. And she certainly didn’t have to worry about talking to the cats, which she did a lot of.
In fact, those afternoons at the store became happier and happier and longer and longer until Melba was spending hardly any time thinking in her room. Melba’s mother noticed.
“You’ve found a friend?” she asked hopefully.
“Well, sort of,” answered Melba, who was not sure, even now, that Miss Toonie could be counted as a friend.
“It’s that old grouch down at Jiggs’ Drug Store,” volunteered Victor, who had somehow found out. “Everybody else hates her.”
“That’s because nobody else knows her very well,” said Melba stoutly, but then she blushed so hard that her mother had to tell Victor to hush up and let people make friends where they found them.
So Melba kept on going to Jiggs’, and business being worse than usual there, she and Miss Toonie mostly had the place to themselves. Except for Mr. Jiggs, of course, whose face, if they had noticed it, was turning yellower and meaner by the hour. Miss Toonie was right. Something more than usual was bothering the old man. Now he had taken to pacing up and down the back room, startling the cats at his heels with sudden turns and swerves. His tables were covered with open account books. Mr. Jiggs paced and figured and paced again. Finally, one dark morning while the cats looked on reproachfully, he brought his fist down in the middle of one particularly dilapidated book and stalked out to the soda fountain counter to announce the bad news.
“Closing down!” shrieked Miss Toonie. “But why?”
“Why do you think!” he roared. Then he disappeared into the back room again, took up his guitar, and struck dire chords.
In shock, Melba asked the same question that afternoon.
“But why? It’s so nice here!” By then Miss Toonie had composed herself. She answered in her snappiest voice.
“Well! Why do you think? I suppose you think you’ve been supporting the store on your measly one sundae a day. Well! You haven’t been! Jiggs has gone broke. He’s selling out.”
“But I thought you hated having customers in the store!” cried Melba.
Miss Toonie ignored her. “There’s to be a dry cleaning establishment taking over next week,” she fumed. “Think of it! Right here where I’m standing now will be a rack of plastic-covered clothes whose only aim in life is to get picked up on time!”
Miss Toonie sniffed such a fierce, sad sniff that her whiskers stood up on end.
Melba stood up too, scattering cats. Her glasses slid sideways.
“You can’t sell out,” she pleaded in a scared voice. “Jiggs’ Drug Store has always been here. What would people do without
Jiggs’?”
“Don’t talk to me about it,” said Miss Toonie. “Talk to him!” She skewed her thumb in the direction of the back room. “And as for what people will do, well, they’ll do what they do now, anyway. They’ll go to the Super Queen. No one will even notice we’ve folded. You’ll see.”
“I’ll notice!” exclaimed Melba, blushing horribly. “And what about the cats? You can’t take them home with you, you said it yourself.”
Miss Toonie looked at the counter.
“Very true,” she agreed. “Poor cats. They will, I suppose, simply have to disperse.”
“No, they won’t! They won’t go! These cats love you. They’re your family, remember?”
“Cats are cats,” said Miss Toonie with a brave wave of her hand. “They’ll go. They’ll go off to somebody else who can feed them.” She groped for her handkerchief and made a last desperate effort to look fierce behind it.
Now Melba shut her lips, and looked down at a worn place under the counter where hundreds of thoughtless feet had scraped and gouged the brittle wood. Cats had been there, too. Fuzzy strands of cat fur were snagged on splinters.
“He can’t do this to you!”
“He can do it,” answered Miss Toonie. “It’s his store.”
“No, it isn’t,” said Melba, low and threatening as a cornered cat’s growl. But her eyes were already filled up with tears. In a minute, she knew, she would have to run away to hide them. That made her angrier, because how many times can you pinch people like Irma Herring up in your room without realizing it doesn’t prove a thing? They don’t know the difference. They go on talking or eating dinner or whatever they are doing in real life and they don’t feel the tiniest prick of outrage, not the lightest drop of a tear. They go on, thought Melba, turning her head to look, playing a guitar as if nothing terrible were happening at all.
Suddenly, Melba was running, but it wasn’t out the front door. She was rounding the entrance into the back room, and even before she got there she was yelling at Mr. Jiggs.
“You spineless man!” she yelled, giving him, at last, a solid dose of his own medicine. “How can you sit here playing that guitar while our store goes down the drain? There are people who depend on this store and you’re not even trying to save it. You don’t even care!”
Then, before Mr. Jiggs, staggering up from his chair, could throw her out, shy Melba Morris stamped out of the store herself, right past Miss Toonie and all the cats, everybody staring.
Chapter Five
MELBA STAMPED DOWN THE sidewalk in a fury. She stamped up Dunn Street and down School Street and along Orchard Street to where the Morris family lived in a house backed up to a middle-sized field. The more she thought about Jiggs’ Drug Store closing down, and about the cats and poor Miss Toonie, and about herself without a drug store to her name, the angrier she became. She stamped into the house, pounded up the stairs to her room, and finding that unsatisfactory (too small for proper stamping), she stamped down again and out the back door.
Half of her, it must be said, was horrified by what she had done. To have shouted at Mr. Jiggs so loudly—“How rude,” said a voice inside her. To be out stamping around in broad daylight—“Not the least like you,” said the voice.
“Go hide yourself,” the voice advised.
“Blush and look guilty,” another voice whispered.
“You are sticking out like a sore thumb!” they hissed together. “What will people say? Quick! Shuffle and be shy.”
Melba, however, was in the grip of a glorious anger which made stamping the most natural thing in the world, and shuffling completely impossible. So she stamped out the back door into the yard, and there, abruptly, came face to muzzle with her brother, Victor.
The muzzle was the barrel of his shotgun. Its black nose was pointed straight at her!
“Out of the way! You’re in the line of fire!” screamed Victor, only just in time.
Melba lurched backward. The shotgun exploded with a terrible blast that echoed across the yard and through the open field beyond. A covey of quail leaped from a hiding place in the tall grass to flap off at top speed. In the following silence came a soft rustle. A squirrel dropped out of a nearby bush, shot through.
“Got him!” screeched Victor. He raced across to grab the victim by its tail. Melba felt dizzy. She put her hands over her ringing ears and closed her eyes. Poor squirrel. It was very dead.
“Hey!” crowed Victor, running back to her. “Don’t ever do that again!”
“Do what?” Melba opened her eyes, but tried not to look at the
remains of the squirrel dangling from his hand.
“Jump out the door that way before anyone can see you. I almost blew your head off.”
“I know,” choked Melba. “I’m still shaking.
This seemed to please Victor. “Better get out of here now, too.” he said manfully. “I’ll be doing some more shooting, I guess. I’ve got some friends coming over soon. We’re going after that groundhog in the field.”
“Do you have to?” asked Melba weakly.
“Guess so. He’s been at the garden.”
Melba looked at her feet.
“Better get going” urged Victor, waving a bloody hand. Squirrel blood.
Melba went. She crept back up to her room and lay down on her bed. Her heart pounded. Her arms shook. She felt terrible. Jiggs’ Drug Store was going out of business, and suddenly there wasn’t a drop of anger left in her.
Melba puts the phone down with a bang. She leaps to her feet and walks in a fast circle around the living room. Then she sits down by the phone again and rubs her elbow. Maybe calling the Guinness Book of World Records isn’t as easy as it sounds at first, even when you’ve figured out the area code and know the telephone number by heart.
“Oh, be quiet,” says Melba. “I was just thinking about Victor. I got blown over pretty easily back then, by him and everybody else. It makes me mad to think how that shotgun blast knocked me out just when I was getting worked up enough about Jiggs’ Drug Store to do something about it. All I could do instead was cry. I cried on my bed with my head under the pillow and all the time there were these blasts and pops going off in the background.
“That was Victor out in the field with his friends. They were shooting at the groundhog and a whole lot of innocent, terrified rabbits.
Dancing Cats of Applesap Page 2